Now That’s Transparency!

June 4th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

Imagine you wanted to find something out like  - who are the top paid Government officials – how would you go about it?

You might think that you’d have to do a lot of fruitless searching or submit a freedom of information request or maybe pay some specialist data aggregator to buy their expensively researched list for a gazillion dollars.

Or you might just go here and download it as a CSV file. Now that’s transparency.




XBRL and Investors – Was XBRL dismissed at South by Southwest?

March 17th, 2010 by Greg Rohan - Chief of Staff

After recently attending a South by Southwest panel  “Data is Money: How Geeks are Changing Finance”, I realized there was a high level of groupthink in regards to how technology and XBRL can empower investors to make better financial decisions.  From the panel, questions from the attending audience, and the twitter comments (#datamoney) posted during the session, it was clear to me that XBRL is often dismissed or misunderstood as a potential solution for current issues regarding data transparency.  A few key points were raised by the panelists in this discussion in regards to this new mandate that need to be clarified and, in my opinion, discussed Read the rest of this entry »




Transparency on Purpose

January 26th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

In a recent post It is NOT different this time, and XBRL will not avoid the coming crisis, author Daniel Roberts quotes Dennis Santiago, CEO of Institutional Risk Analytics, as saying: “bottom line is that as long as people are allowed to create opacity on purpose in finance these problems will resurface from time to time.” Something that strikes me as worth reflecting on. Read the rest of this entry »